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Obama Warned of Huge Debt

Updated 04.21.17 5:43PM ET / Published 01.23.12 11:04AM ET

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New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza has obtained hundreds of pages of internal memos written to President Obama by his advisers over the years, dating back to the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2007, for a new piece that adds up to a detailed portrait of the president’s postpartisan ideology and how it has evolved—quite successfully in the end, but only after serious mistakes, Lizza argues. For example, one of the documents central to the article is a 57-page memo written in 2008 by Larry Summers, then the incoming director of the National Economic Council, that warns the president: “If your campaign promises were enacted … the deficit would rise by another $100 billion annually. The consequence would be the largest run-up in the debt since World War II.” Lizza also notes, though, that the deficit would also come from much legislation left over by President Bush—including funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—that Obama would have to sign. The memo also suggested that the administration’s current excuse for a weak stimulus—that it should have been larger, but politics made that impossible—was not the whole truth, in that Summers believed the markets would reject a bigger package.